The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith
The Hallmarked Man is the eighth Strike and Robin novel by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling), which was published on 2nd September 2025. This series is my absolute favourite, so I was very excited to get my copy and start reading immediately on publication day.
The Hallmarked Man addresses the elephant in the room almost straightaway – the long will they/ won’t they saga between Strike and Robin. Right at the start of the book, Strike acknowledges his feelings and tries to decide when, where and how he should make his declaration to Robin before it’s too late, as things start to look more serious between Robin and her boyfriend, DI Ryan Murphy.
Taking place a few months after the events of the previous book – The Running Grave, definitely the scariest book in the series – Strike and Robin investigate a mutilated man found in the vault of a silver shop. The murder happened while Robin was still undercover. It caused big publicity at the time, but then the police decided they’d identified the body and it all went quiet.
But a woman on the edges of Strike’s old social circle believes the man could have been her boyfriend. There is very little evidence to indicate that she is right, but she won’t accept that he disappeared because he was only interested in her money or was scared of commitment. So Strike and Robin agree to take the case.
There are lots of potential victims and loads of witnesses. It can get slightly confusing, but I don’t mind that. I just get totally lost in this world and couldn’t stop reading, wanting everything to work out.
Strike and Robin are at their most infuriating in this book. They both have feelings they can’t or won’t express and secrets they try to hide for fear of looking bad or weak, which causes misunderstanding and frustration. I really wished they would communicate better, but that is part of what makes them seem so real.
One of the many brilliant things about this series is the dialogue. It always feels completely natural and fits perfectly with the individual characters. You will never find characters shoehorning an unnatural amount of information into the dialogue or using words and phrases that someone from their background wouldn’t use, like you read in many novels.
At just under 900 pages, The Hallmarked Man isn’t for the fainthearted. I was reading it in every spare moment I could get, but it still took me a week to read it. I was both desperate to know how it would end and sad that it would soon be over.
If you like a detective story with lead characters you can really care about, I would highly recommend The Hallmarked Man. You could read it as a standalone novel, but I would recommend going back either to the start or back a few books, to really get a feel for Strike and Robin and how their relationship has developed.
